


The Story of a Spirit

by schweinsty



Series: Poet Verse Prompt Fics [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Gen, Literature Nerdery, Massive fluff, Minor Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 05:10:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9803960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweinsty/pseuds/schweinsty
Summary: The first major literary movement of the New Jedhan Boom was known as Anaism. Many literary historians later considered Master Poet Bodhi Rook to be largely responsible for consciously beginning the movement with a carefully-composed poem.They were wrong.Or: Bodhi is better at writing than he is at teaching, his students have no idea, and Jyn has a weakness for terrible holoshows.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hauntedjaeger (saellys)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/gifts).



> 1\. Pardon the wait! I ended up doing some last-minute rewrites on this which took a couple of extra days. This was written for a prompt as part of [that tumblr thing I'm doing](http://schweinsty.tumblr.com/post/157280372055/re-poetverse-fic-donations) (which is still going; see the post for updates). (Also, the person who emailed me on Feb 7 whose name starts with a T: you might want to check your email! I'm just going to need your prompt :))
> 
> 2\. If y'all are interested, I can put up a glossary of Jedhan terms/poems up later this weekend, probably; I just wanted to get this fic out as soon as possible.

_The first major literary movement of the New Jedhan Boom was known as Anaism, a name taken from the high Jedhan root word for legend or folklore. Unique among contemporary movements, primarily those of Coruscant and Alderaan, which sought to capture as realistically as possible the trauma and devastation of war and of the Empire's brutality, Anaism liberally employed the use of metaphor, with few if any graphic depictions of death; its defining characteristic was the presence of supernatural elements, particularly mythological creatures or spirits from Jedhan folklore. Scholars debate the precise origins of the use of the supernatural among the literature of the Diaspora, with some contending that the trend existed in contemporary Jedhan poetry in the two years preceding the destruction of Jedha, but the Anaist movement itself is agreed to have started with the publication of 'Bhule-din abha vuripaa' [The child-spirit's challenge to death], a _shinaat_ written by the Master Poet, Bodhi Rook, to commemorate the graduation of the first scholars of the New Academy._

-Excerpt from **New Jedha: Restoration and Innovation** , by Shofe Salu

 

“Kriff. Kriff kriff kriff kriff. Kriff!”

Kaytoo didn't want to get involved; Bodhi never made this much noise when he was seriously injured, which meant it must be some human concern, and, as with most human concerns, Kaytoo wanted nothing to do with it. But everyone else was out, Cassian had just fallen asleep after being up all night with a colicky baby, and Bodhi was making quite a bit of noise indeed.

So Kaytoo walked into the study to see what was wrong and found Bodhi digging through his desk drawers for pen and paper.

"Pardon me," Kaytoo started, “but--”

“Graduation.”

Judging by the stubble on Bodhi's face and the dark circles under his eyes, Cassian had not been the only one kept up by the colicky baby the night before. Bodhi, however, looked like he had no intention of sleeping, and inked his pen with a snarl when he finally found it.

"I can't believe I forgot about the graduation." Bodhi slapped several sheets of paper on the desk in front of him and gave them a look of what Kaytoo's circuits translated as 'misery'. “Kriffing kriff. Master Poets are supposed to write _shinaat_ for the graduating class. Uncle Alif spent days on his-- _days_. And I have two hours, and—I'm a terrible Master Poet.”

He leaned forward and smacked his forehead against his desk, then lay still. Kaytoo stuck out a tentative arm and laid a hand on his back; no, the human was in perfectly fine working order, aside from some minor exhaustion, elevated blood pressure, and a patch of spit-up on the left shoulder of his robe.

"I don't even know what to write," Bodhi said, clutching at his hair dramatically.

Kaytoo took a step back. Yes, he really should have stayed out of this one. Next time he would heed his first instinct. There was so little one could do with humans, honestly. He turned to leave. One of the joints in his left leg-where the metal had warped a bit from the fire on Nandu—squeaked as he turned.

“You should really get that oiled," Bodie said without looking up, his voice muffled against the desk. "You sound like a ghost wailing on the—oh!”

Kaytoo left Bodhi muttering about ghosts and spirits and stopped to check on Cassian—who was still out of it on the large couch in the living room, with an eight-month-old baby on his chest and two toddlers sprawled out beside him-- on his way to the laundry. By the time Kaytoo brought Bodhi a clean new robe for the graduation ceremony, Bodhi was waving around a sheet of paper in the air to make the ink dry faster.

"It's not bad," he said, actually panting. "Not great, but it's just for the ceremony and nobody has to see it again after that.”

Humans, Kaytoo thought, were definitely more trouble than they were worth, for the most part, but at least they generally knew how to fix themselves—which was more than could be said for a lot of droids.

 

_Over the next year, several other poems incorporating Anaist symbolism were published, including a small collection of _dasa_ by Master Shuna Ioto, a professor at the New Academy. The trend seemed to be dying out, however, when Hana El-Liin, head of the survivors of the Jedhan branch of the nomadic clan of Speardancers and a student at the New Academy, published as her undergraduate dissertation an innovative prose work which built directly off of the imagery in Master Rook and Master Ioto's poems, perhaps so influenced as it was written under their direct instruction._

 

Bodhi only attended four months of his first year at the Academy before the Empire took him, but he remembered them vividly. One thing he never understood at the time, though, was the look that his new professors gave him when they saw a scrawny, too-young child sitting front-and-center in their classrooms and found out his surname was Rook. Part appraisal, part apprehension, and usually accompanied with a furrowed brow that denoted a stress headache, this look often preceded a muttered mention of 'Sahinta' or 'the little brother' under their breath.

The day he met with Hana El-Liin to discuss her course work, he finally understood what that was all about.

“You definitely have talent,” he said, very carefully.

(“You're not a bad teacher,” Jyn told him the evening before at supper when he finally came out with it. “You really have a talent for pointing out whenever someone does something incorrectly.”

He frowned. “That's not actually a compliment.”

“See?” Cassian, bouncing little Tula on his knee, asked with a grin on his face. “Just like that.”

Baze had only spoken up when Chirrut very obviously elbowed him. “You want advice on the qualities of good teachers, and you ask the child soldiers?”

Chirrut, who was far too busy blowing raspberries on Kostu's stomach to take a substantial part in the conversation, had taken a quick moment to nod and say something about tempering truth with kindness before turning back to the baby.)

 _Kindness_ , Bodhi thought in misery. How was one supposed to _kindly_ call someone's poetic forms an abomination? Why did teaching have to be so much more difficult than composing?

“It's obvious you choose your words very carefully,” he plunged forward. And it was true—Hana's wordsmithery showed an inborn skill at the art of writing evocatively; she had a natural instinct at it. Which made the rest of it harder. “It's just—new poetic forms and subforms, they, uh, they can be developed, but you really need to have the rules mastered before you break them, and—”

Hana bit her lip and twisted her fingers in her lap, and Bodhi cut himself off.

Born premature, with Deshisa Syndrome, it was a miracle Hana hadn't died as a baby. A member of the ruling family of the Jedhan branch of the Speardancer clan, the partial paralysis she'd sustained from her illness had limited her participation in clan rituals—until, at the age of thirteen, she found herself the sole survivor of her family and the default head of the branch. Unable to lead the traditional dances, she'd determined to capture the spirit of the clan in literature and had named a distant cousin as temporary head while she did a year of study at the New Academy.

She'd worked so hard, both at resettling and rebuilding her clan and at her studies at the Academy, and Bodhi—Bodhi just couldn't tell her that her writing was fine in theory but absolutely terrible when it came to the poetic forms, seen as nearly sacred, that had evolved in her clan in the seven thousand years since they'd developed a written language.

Hana's eyes watered. Beads of sweat broke out on Bodhi's forehead.

“Have you tried,” he started, and he honestly didn't know what he was going to say until his eyes alighted on one of the odder Jedhan volumes the Restoration Fund had recently discovered in a private collection on Coruscant. The rest just sort of burst out of him of its own accord. “Maybe you could try writing a novel?”

 

_Before the Diaspora, novels and other works of prose occupied a relatively small space in the pantheon of Jedhan literature; novels were often seen as inferior, foreign-influenced curiosities and rarely considered serious literature, and, with a few notable exceptions, those few Jedhan novelists often found greater fame and acclaim offworld on Coruscant or Alderaan. El-Liin's novella, _Sarata ti bhule-din anaika_ [The story of Sara and the child-spirit], however, quickly became a best-seller, both on New Jedha and on other planets, in part due to the network of literary clubs that grew, after the Empire's defeat, out of the reading group originally established on the Alliance military base of Yavin IV by Master Rook. Anaist symbolism soon began to be appear in New Jedhan art of all kinds. One landmark work was a series of feast _yitha_ woven by Sula'il Walet (later known as Sula'il El-Liin) which reimagined the _bhule-din_ , traditionally the spirit of a child who died before puberty, as a voluptuous young woman, setting the stage for the modernizing of Jedhan folklore that followed._

 

“Uncle, I don't get it.”

Bodhi, for the fourth time that morning, disentangled Kostu's hands from his hair—which was apparently incredibly tempting to toddlers with sticky fingers—and looked up to see his favorite student walk unannounced into the kitchen where he and Baze were attempting to feed the children a late breakfast. Hana propped the door open with one of her canes and reached into the large bag slung over her shoulders to pull out a brightly-colored—oh. _Oh._

“I think it's supposed to be a bhule-din,” Hana said, spreading the miniature _yitha_ —sized, at best, for two people to eat on—over the counter near the stove. “But bhule-din are supposed to be pale, and this one has brown skin like—honestly, it's kind of like me? Except, more, you know.”

She propped her other cane down against the fridge, leaned against the counter, and made vague curving motions in the air with her hands. Baze nodded gravely. Bodhi pursed his lips.

“Sula'il made this for you?” He and Baze shared a glance at Hana's nod. “You were, what, thirteen when Jedha fell?”

Hana nodded again.

“Husband!” Baze called out, turning away from little Arif, who rested comfortably in the crook of Baze's arm with a half-empty bottle propped up to his lips. “Kitchen!”

Bodhi turned to Hana as Chirrut's familiar steps sounded on the stairs. “Have a seat,” he said, nodding at a chair. “Chirrut's going to teach you all about Jedhan courting traditions.”

 

_By 8 ABY, Anaist art spread as far as the Benedarian System, including in works of popular culture. Several holoshows on Coruscant centered around Jedhan folklore were produced over the next four years, including the smash hit musical “Halima”, which retold the story of Jedha's most famous female governor and her courageous actions during the Olsho Crisis._

 

“This is,” Bodhi started, and stopped.

“Awful?” Cassian volunteered from the other end of the couch.

“Terrible,” Baze agreed.

Chirrut, flat on his back on the floor, held a giggling Arif over his head but stopped making X-Wing sounds. “At least say they got the costumes right.”

Baze shook his head. “You don't want to know.”

Chirrut sighed and restarted the X-Wing buzz.

Bodhi nodded. “I can't watch this.” He moved to get up, but Jyn, who was leaning up against his shoulder with her feet in Cassian's lap, made a noise of distress.

“Actually,” she said, “I kind of like it.”

Bodhi settled back down with a sigh. “Fine.”

“Don't worry,” Cassian said at the end of the first episode. “I'm sure in ten, fifteen years they'll find another part of your culture to desecrate.”

 

_By 16 ABY, however, the popularity of Anaist art started to wane, giving way to the gritty realism of Vaadaism following the publication of Master Rook's fourth volume of poetry, _Sukothayadiva_ , [Anniversary 15], commemorating the destruction of Jedha._


End file.
